Chosen People, a Promised Land

Mormonism and Race in Hawai’i

Hokulani K. Aikau

Publication Year: 2012

Christianity figured prominently in the imperial and colonial exploitation and dispossession of indigenous peoples worldwide, yet many indigenous people embrace Christian faith as part of their cultural and ethnic identities. A Chosen People, a Promised Land gets to the heart of this contradiction by exploring how Native Hawaiian members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (more commonly known as Mormons) understand and negotiate their place in this quintessentially American religion.

Mormon missionaries arrived in Hawai‘i in 1850, a mere twenty years after Joseph Smith founded the church. Hokulani K. Aikau traces how Native Hawaiians became integrated into the religious doctrine of the church as a “chosen people”—even at a time when exclusionary racial policies regarding black members of the church were being codified. Aikau shows how Hawaiians and other Polynesian saints came to be considered chosen and how they were able to use their venerated status toward their own spiritual, cultural, and pragmatic ends.

Using the words of Native Hawaiian Latter-Day Saints to illuminate the intersections of race, colonization, and religion, A Chosen People, a Promised Land examines Polynesian Mormon articulations of faith and identity within a larger political context of self-determination.

Cover

Contents

Preface

As a child growing up in Utah I attended church with my family
every Sunday. Our Sunday school lessons were filled with stories of the
prophet Joseph Smith Jr. whose faith and dedication established the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ...

Introduction: Negotiating Faithfulness

Hawaiianness and Mormonism came to be fused through a
religious invention initiated by the Mormon missionary George Q.
Cannon who had a vision in 1851 that traced Polynesian lineage to The
Book of Mormon and to Israel. This articulation expanded the racial and religious
boundaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ...

1. Mormonism, Race, and Lineage: The Making of a Chosen People

In the 1850s the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
drawing upon dominant notions of race and worthiness, began to redraw
the boundaries between those souls who they deemed chosen and those
who were not. At that time the church reasoned that the social meanings of
black skin marked sin and unworthiness. ...

2. Lā'ie, a Promised Land, and Pu‘uhonua: Spatial Struggles for Land and Identity

In 1865 the Mormon church purchased six thousand acres of
the Lā‘ie ahupua‘a (a subsection of an island district that stretches pieshaped
from the mountain to the sea) to provide Hawaiian Latter-day Saints
with a gathering place in Hawai‘i where they could live among coreligionists. ...

3. Called to Serve: Labor Missionary Work and Modernity

As I described in the previous chapter, the process of transforming
Lā‘ie into a modern town was not without conflict and contradiction.
The diminishing significance of the gathering principle corresponded
to political and economic shifts taking place in the Mormon church as a
whole. ...

4. In the Service of the Lord: Religion, Race, and the Polynesian Cultural Center

On May 7, 1964, Emosi Damuni followed his cousin Isireli
Racule across the Pacific from Fiji to the Polynesian Cultural Center
in Lā‘ie, Hawai‘i. Damuni and his wife Sereima resigned from their jobs—his
as a teacher at the local school and hers as a nurse—and immigrated with
their family. ...

In the previous chapter I documented the tensions that arose
between members of the Polynesian Cultural Center management who
approached culture as a material object for tourism and the Polynesian student
workers who got more out of their jobs than just a paycheck. ...

Conclusion: Holomua, Moving Forward

When I set off on the huaka‘i that became this book I wanted
to make sense of how Polynesian members of the Mormon church
negotiate what appeared to me to be an irreconcilable tension between a
(politicized) ethnic identity and a Christian-American-Mormon affiliation. ...

Acknowledgments

Iwas not a solitary traveler on this journey but was aided in my pursuits
by colleagues, friends, and family. I thank Russell C. Taylor at the L. Tom
Perry Special Collections Library at Brigham Young University–Provo for
his help in accessing missionary records and oral histories and Kris Nelson
at the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies ...

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